


The First Deaths

by queenbookwench



Category: Old Kingdom - Garth Nix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-20
Updated: 2007-12-20
Packaged: 2018-01-25 08:11:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1640699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queenbookwench/pseuds/queenbookwench
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Someone has to take care of the bodies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The First Deaths

**Author's Note:**

> Written for dzurlady

 

 

Sabriel stripped off her armor, sword, and bandolier, all streaked with muck and blood, and sank down onto the bed. She thought for a moment that the images of all she had seen and done that night would surely keep her awake, but before she finished the thought she was asleep--the dreamless sleep of the profoundly exhausted, long and empty and dark as the bottom of a well.

When she woke, the strip of sunlight across the floor was red-gold. It had to be late afternoon, and as soon as she realized this, she sat straight up in bed. Almost immediately afterwards, she became aware that her bones were sore, her muscles ached, and she stank. She noticed that a chair had been pulled up next to her bed, and in that chair was Touchstone, who had fallen asleep himself while waiting for her to wake up. Hearing her stir, he jerked in the chair and rubbed his eyes.

"Why did you let me sleep so late?" She struggled to gather herself together and hurry out of the room; there must be something urgent she had to do, if only she could think of what it was.

"Sabriel, sit down and take a breath," he said quietly. "You needed to rest, and we haven't anywhere to go just yet."

"But surely there must be..." Must be what? She didn't want to complete her thought, didn't want to make it real by speaking it aloud.

Touchstone looked her in the eyes, and the expression in his own was full of something that made her go very still.

"Sabriel," he said, and this time his voice was warm and gentle, "you needn't do everything. You won--we saved the world, or at least our bit. Come on and have some breakfast."

"Isn't it almost dinner time, though?" As soon as she asked, Sabriel felt that it had been a completely inane thing to say.

"Well, yes, but I'm pretty sure that the cook here--Mrs. Wilkinson, I think her name is?--will make you anything you like. She seems very fond of you."

Touchstone walked with her to the school kitchens, where Mrs. Wilkinson, whom the girls had always called Mrs. Cook, covered her with hugs and kisses, then served up a platter of bacon, eggs, and toast, with coffee and clotted cream. It reminded Sabriel of her first days at Wycherley, five years old and lonely, when she used to sneak down to the kitchens and Mrs. Cook would give her a hug, along with a sweet or a piece of buttered scone. Her eyes stung, but all the same she dug into her plate with unladylike haste. She thought she remembered eating something the day before, but it had been such a very long day. Touchstone sat beside her, saying nothing but resting his hand on her back.

As she was scraping up the last bits of egg with her fork, a youngish man in uniform, whom she vaguely recognized from the night before, appeared at the far end of the kitchen and began to walk purposefully in her direction. A small cowardly part of her wanted to run away, but she forced herself to sit up and try to look like the sort of person who knew what she was doing, which was rather difficult, considering that her hair was still wet from a visit to the school baths and there was bacon grease on her chin.

Touchstone greeted the officer with a friendly, "Hello, captain!". It was odd to think that they were arranging things while she slept, but she supposed that it shouldn't be. Touchstone was a prince, after all, he ought to be good at administrating.

The captain nodded in reply, then addressed himself to Sabriel. "Miss, er, Abhorsen..."

"Sabriel will be perfectly fine."

"Sabriel, then. I'm Captain Stephen Williams of the Perimeter Scouts. I'm currently the commanding officer here, as I'm the highest-ranking fellow left alive." His mouth twisted downward. "I wanted to ask your, er, professional opinion, in the matter of the bodies."

"The bodies?"

"Yes. We've been digging through the collapsed areas, giving first aid to the survivors and laying out the bodies of the dead. Once the electricity came back on I dispatched a man off to the telegraph office in town to contact HQ and try to reach the families of the girls. He just reported in, says a cable came back that HQ will be assembling an escort to travel by rail with the families as far as the nearest depot. We'll have to send someone out to pick them up; they're expected to arrive tomorrow."

"I'm sorry--I apologize for my rudeness, but I'm much too tired to be polite--what does this have to do with the questions you have for me?"

"Well, with regard to the bodies--they don't much hold with embalmers and such, up here near the Border; a quick burial or cremation is SOP. Only with the families and all the bigwigs coming tomorrow, they might not be too pleased to learn that we've burnt up their daughters and half the regiment. They don't always understand, down South, what it's like up here. So, what I'm asking is, is there a Charter spell you can use to preserve the bodies, and would it be safe to use such a spell? I mean, are there likely to be any more nasties coming out of the ether to try to take them over?"

Sabriel took a moment to digest this flow of information, then said "With Kerrigor defeated and sent past the Ninth Gate, all the other spirits who accompanied him should have gone as well."

With that she slipped back into Death, surveying the region near the First Gate. All was still and calm. There was no trace of either Kerrigor's servants or the spirits of those who had died in the night. They had truly passed. She felt no ripples, nothing to indicate any spirit close enough to reach into Life, which was already more difficult on this side of the Wall.

She stepped back into life and licked a light encrustation of frost from her lips.

"It seems to be safe, as far as I can tell, Captain Williams."

"Much obliged, ma'am, er, Sabriel."

"See if you can round up anyone from among your people who has a Charter mark and isn't dead on his feet." The moment after she said it, she winced at the poor choice of words. So did the captain. "I'll teach them the Charter-spell for preservation."

"I'll come with you, Sabriel," Touchstone said. "I've heard of that spell, but I don't know it myself." He stood close behind her as they followed Captain Williams out.

The soldiers had laid the bodies in the courtyard at the front of the school. They lay on the cobblestones and on patches of muddy earth, unrecognizable as the green lawn of yesterday afternoon. The rose garden in front of the entrance had been tramples, and the statue-encrusted fountain at its center had been knocked over. Sabriel felt tears prickle again at the corners of her eyes, and thought it was strange, because she'd always thought that fountain was hideous. Ellimere used to make up rude stories about what the naked statues around the edges of the fountain got up to...Ellimere. Sabriel pushed the thought of her away once more.

A couple of hollow-eyed soldiers had joined them from somewhere and she said, "All right then, let me show you the spell." She concentrated on blocking everything else out, on reaching into the Charter, with its vast flow of symbols binding the world together and drawing out the one symbol she needed. She sketched it in the air, then had the others practice until she was satisfied as to their competence. Then she split them up, directing some of the soldiers over to their fallen comrades, while she worked on the bodies of the girls. She wasn't sure if it was sentimentality or self-flagellation, but somehow she felt that the spell ought to be performed by someone who knew them, who saw Pippa and Anne and Clarissa, not just some nameless schoolgirls, who remembered magic lessons and school picnics, small quarrels and kindnesses. She looked up from the body of Clarissa, a girl she'd never liked, and saw, working near her, the one living person she was completely unready to see--Suilyn. She was sending the Charter spell tenderly over the body of Magistrix Greenwood.

"Sabriel," she said, "don't be...I didn't get a chance to tell you..."

"What?"

"Look--Jacinth--over there"

A few bodies down from where Sabriel stood was a girl who was noticeably younger than the others, her body looking even smaller in death. Sabriel had a flash of memory from not so long ago, of bending the rules of Life and Death to save Jacinth's rabbit, because he was precious to her and Jacinth, despite her wealthy family, had little enough to cling to. How bitter to realize that the rabbit still lived, but she had been unable to do anything to save Jacinth herself.

"What happened? She was supposed to be out of danger, as much as anyone could be, with the younger girls in the North Tower. She was only in Fourth Form!" Sabriel looked imploringly at Suilyn.

"She snuck away from the others--she wanted to help us. I don't think anyone realized she was here until we were making the circle, and by then it was too late." Suilyn fell silent, and both girls stared down the line of girls--friends, enemies, protégés--and Ellimere, at the end of the line, her leg crushed, the laughter that had always animated her gone from her face.

Sabriel swayed a little, feeling nauseous. This was the closest she'd ever come to losing her composure in the presence of the dead. Taking her hand, Suilyn led her away. "Come on," she said, "let the others finish."

Sabriel followed her, for once happy to be passive, done-to rather than doing. Suilyn led her down winding hallways lined with group portraits of earlier classes of Wycherley girls. Perhaps Sabriel's imagination was starting to grow a bit hysterical but all the girls seemed to be gazing at her with either fear or anger in their faces, condemning her for violating their sanctuary.

Somehow, though Sabriel couldn't quite reconstruct the path that they took, they ended up in Ellimere's study, which was typically welcoming and untidy, looking as though she had just stepped to get a book. She glanced over at Suilyn and saw that she was thinking the same thing.

"I keep expecting to see her standing in the doorway saying, `See, it was all a mistake, I'm not really dead, the joke's on you two.' It just doesn't seem _right_ that she won't be coming back here. She was always going forward, going ahead of the rest of us, and now she isn't here at all. "

"Remember last term," Suilyn added, "when she talked us into trying that wine she'd cadged from home, and we thought it was dreadful! "

"Yes! I tried to reach out to the Charter and all I could touch was a swirling ball of lights."

"I wonder if she still has any of that wine--we could use it now!"

Needing no further encouragement, Sabriel scrabbled around under Ellimere's bed and found the very same wine bottle. She'd heard that if you drank too many glasses of wine in a row, you could fall into q stupor. Right then, oblivion sounded extremely appealing.

They found two of Ellimere's coffee mugs and poured themselves, generous portions. They knocked the mugs together and said, "To Ellimere," before downing them as fast as they could, then sharing out what little was left in the bottle.

The hot, sweet burn of wine in Sabriel's stomach loosened the hard knot of grief inside her like nothing else could. Words and sobs came tumbling out of her, stumbling over themselves to be heard.

"You should hate me for this, Suilyn. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. You were safe, and I brought Death here. I used you all, `cause it was the only way to win, only way to stop it, but you didn't know, none of you could have, but I knew, I knew. I knew and I did it anyway. Can you forgive me Suilyn? Can you forgive me? Because I'd do it again if I had to. Even knowing about Ellimere, and Magistrix Greenwood, and Jacinth, I'd come. Can you forgive me?"

Suilyn stroked Sabriel's long dark hair and held her. "There's nothing to forgive; there was nothing else you could have done. You say you brought death here, but death would have come anyway if that terrible spirit-thing ("Kerrigor," Sabriel murmured) had won."

"But I knew, I knew--and none of you could have known what it meant to face him. They don't teach that in Anclelstierrian magic books."

"I won't lie to you, my dear; it scares me a little, what you're becoming. That power over Death. To the little ones you're already a hero. They look at you and see the Abhorsen, not the girl who used to be their prefect. But you're still Sabriel and I've known you since you were seven years old. You hate spinach and calisthenics, you have no patience for gossip, your sense of humor is odd, and you're really very kind although you always try to convince the first formers that you're terribly strict. And that's just the smallest bit. Please don't forget those small things, like friendship, when you're going off to save the world."

I-I'll try to remember."

Their talk stretched onto the late hours, well lubricated by wine, and eventually they were able to laugh and tell stories and remember their friend Ellimere. Finally, Suilyn helped Sabriel to her old bedroom, which was comfortingly familiar and yet so, so strange.

Sometime later, in the darkest hours of the night, she woke screaming, caught in a swirl of images--Kerrigor stalking toward her in the hall, her father calling her name and then falling away into the dark. Perhaps by magic, perhaps by the electric pull of her grief calling to his, Touchstone came. He reached for her, and she pulled him close, pulled him into her bed. And there he stayed, body wrapped tight around hers, until morning.

Once they both woke, dimly, and Touchstone murmured. "We should get married."

"A'right then" Sabriel murmured. `when?"

"Tomorrow is good; we c'n get a priest, after the funerals."

And that is what they did. After all the ceremonies, the grieving and the celebration, they slipped away to cross the Border as quietly as they could. And nine months later, Sabriel passed a message across the Border to Suilyn -"I have a little girl. Her name is Ellimere."

 

 

 


End file.
